The prior art has disclosed a number and variety of interactive electronic calendaring systems and method. The objective of all of these systems is primarily to assist the person who, for a number of different reasons, maintains a calendar of future events containing various information about the event at entry points on the calendar which relative to the time of the event.
The increase of personal computers and intelligent workstations in recent years has made it possible for calendar owners to establish and maintain their calendars on these interactive type data processing systems.
Two general types of interactive electronic calendaring systems have thus evolved in the art. In one type of calendaring system, the owner of the calendar is generally also the user of the workstation and that workstation is generally not a part of a larger network. Generally, in these types of systems, the calendar functions involve presenting a screen to the user representing a day calendar divided into a number of time periods or time slots. Each period is capable of displaying a limited amount of text that the user enters. In some systems, the day calendar can scroll vertically to present more time periods to the user or horizontally to present longer text entries. The operator can generally "page" forward or backward and, in most arrangements, can display a requested date. These calendaring methods generally do not limit the type of event that is calendared nor the terminology employed at any of the entry points and, to that extent, function in the same manner as conventional manual calendars or appointment books.
The electronic calendaring method and systems do have an advantage over the prior art manual calendaring of events in that the user generally has the ability to scan a time span involving a large number of days and identify calendared events quite rapidly.
The other type of calendaring arrangement that has developed in the prior art involves multi-user environments having a large number of terminals or workstations which are generally part of a larger communication network. Usually these networks have been established to permit the users to interact with each other and with data maintained on the system. In this environment, a user at a terminal or workstation can send a message to one or more of the other users on the network concurrently, and is notified when the addressees have received and read the message. In most of these environments, each user generally maintains a calendar, and in many of these environments the reason for having a network in which users interact, quite often involves user interaction that requires reference to the respective electronic calendars of the users. A considerable amount of time is therefore spent by calendar users in many organizations, with people checking and rearranging their calendars to accommodate various events such as meetings and presentations.
Calendar systems have progressed to the point where a person who is calling a meeting can at least view the calendars of a number of users that he intends to invite to a meeting, in order to determine a common available time for the meeting. (U.S. Pat. No. 4,676,836 is an example of such a system.) In this prior art system, a screen is presented to the meeting originator which requests the data necessary for the system to determine times that all potential attendees would be available. The data requested includes, for example, the length of the meeting, a time period during which the meeting should be conducted, the place of the meeting and the names of the attendees. Based on this data, the method returns a screen of available times after inspecting each attendee's day calendar during the time period for free time slots or periods.
The originator then selects the beginning time and end time of the meeting, including the time and date, and invitations are automatically sent to all the attendees, requesting their attendance at the scheduled meeting.
While such an automatic system saves time in finding a convenient meeting time, relative to the manual process, the process is limited to the scheduling of meetings based on "free time" as represented by the absence of a calendar entry on each of the inspected calendars. This approach does not recognize that some calendar entries are less important than others and, in practice, it is often impossible to find a common period of "free time" for a meeting that involves a large group of people or a meeting involving a number of people whose work requires a large number of meetings.
These deficiencies of the prior art electronic calendaring methods, namely using only free time to find relevant calendar entries, are overcome by the invention disclosed and claimed in cross-referenced application Ser. No. 008,034 now U.S. Pat. No. 4,831,552.
In accordance with that invention, an electronic calendaring method is provided in which a calendar owner can request the system to display or print out a selected subset of calendar entries from a plurality of calendars maintained by the electronic calendaring system. The method assists the calendar owner in defining the selected subset by presenting to him a "view select" screen containing various prompts to which he responds by keying in the search criteria that he wishes to employ, to determine if a calendar entry belongs to the subset. The subset is then displayed in one or more composite screens. Since criteria other than free time may be employed in defining the selected subset, the "view select" function can be used to provide enhancements to functions such as the automatic scheduling of meetings.
As explained in detail in that application, calendared events that have a lower priority than the event being calendared can be included on the composite calendar so that an event that is calendared can be potentially displaced. If the system also allows a calendar owner to develop responses to invitations automatically based on pre-established criteria and data contained in the invitation, such as described in cross-referenced application Ser. No. 008,033 now U.S. Pat. No. 4,807,154 then it is quite permissible and acceptable for entries to be entered on an owners calendar in his absence.
Most workstations which are connected to a large system allow a calendar owner to make a copy of his calendar in machine readable form so that he can review and modify that copy at another terminal which may be at home or another location. Many individuals therefore make a machine readable copy of their calendar on a diskette which they carry with them when they are away from the office. If these individuals have portable type personal computers then it is a simple matter to update that copy as the need arises when they are away from the office.
While an individual is away from his office there are generally a number of entries that are made, if only on a tentative basis, to the system copy of the calendar. These may be made by an assistant or automatically or both depending on what the calendar owner has arranged to do when he is away from the system. The problem arises that on return to the office the entries on each copy must be reconciled on a manual basis by the calendar owner or an assistant which can sometimes result in a time consuming, error prone, tedious endeavor. The present invention avoids this problem by providing an automatic interactive reconciliation process.